


In My Home, We Smoke Icicles

by dear_tiger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:37:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_tiger/pseuds/dear_tiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is under a spell of an ice witch, who is trying to get to him. Sam quits smoking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In My Home, We Smoke Icicles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [harrigan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/harrigan/gifts).



Sam’s first thought was that here was his chance to get Dean to eat something healthy and give those arteries a break. His second was: Dean was going to be so pissed. 

“No hot food?” he repeated into the phone. His eyes drifted over to the dairy shelves, lined with milk and yogurt and cottage cheese. Dean was going to shit a brick. He was going to go on a hunger strike. “Bobby, what am I supposed to feed him?”

“Cold pizza?” Bobby suggested, unfazed. He sounded like he was eating something. It was probably something hot, too. “Chips?”

“Fuck my life. I’ll try sandwiches.” 

“You do what you gotta do.” 

Sam threw some tomatoes and a couple of cucumbers into the basket, figuring that those were least likely to piss Dean off. Avocadoes were a stretch. He almost bypassed them, until he realized that if Dean wasn’t allowed any hot food for a month, it would be cruel to eat it in front of him. He added the avocadoes, for himself.

“The thing is a kind of an ice witch, from what I understand,” Bobby was saying. “She will only live until the next new moon, unless she can suck out Dean’s life before then. You said she kissed him?”

“Briefly. She looked like an old bum. She asked us for money in the parking lot, then kissed him all of a sudden.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how they hunt.” There was a sound of a spoon hitting a plate and a slurping noise. Bobby was eating soup. Hot, tasty soup. Sam was beginning to miss it already. “How you two morons are still alive is anybody’s guess.”

“At least she won’t go after anyone else this month. All we have to do is keep her away, and then she dies.” A month of Dean with no hot food, no hot water, no open fire, with the room’s temperature barely above freezing. That was going to be fun. “Easy.” 

He added a pack of cocktail shrimp and some garlic sauce, because hey, might as well celebrate their dumb luck.

“No visitors you don’t know,” Bobby went on. “No delivery guys, no lost hikers, no strippers, no hookers, not even animals. She will try and get in.”

“No hookers. Got it.” The cashier raised an eyebrow at him, and Sam smiled. 

“Hey Sam, no smoking either. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Nah, he is on and off, goes for months without. It doesn’t bother him.” 

“I’m talking about you.” 

Sam laughed a little, surprised. “Bobby, I only share with him sometimes for company. I don’t smoke.” 

“Yeah, Sam, you do. Remember, nothing hot until the next new moon, and let absolutely no one into the house – no man and no animal. Say hi to Dean for me.” 

Bobby hung up, and Sam put the groceries into the car and got behind the wheel. There was a pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment, next to the spare gun. He pulled it out and stared at it. He bought it last weekend. A smoker was someone like Dad’s old buddies, the ones that went through a pack, even two packs a day, the ones with a cough and nicotine stains on the tips of their fingers. Sam and Dean both picked up cigarettes as teenagers because everyone they knew smoked, because it was a part of life. Then came Stanford, where Sam was suddenly the ghetto kid, with gross habits and an old man’s taste in music. He changed, he quit – for four years, until they were on the road again and he needed something to stop him from climbing the walls. He didn’t smoke much these days: maybe a cigarette a day, maybe every other day. He could stop.

He put the pack back into the glove compartment and started the engine. 

The cabin, belonging to a friend of Bobby’s friend or something like that, sat far off the main road, with the private access road running for a good mile through the woods. Sam drove slowly, worried about the Impala getting stuck in the snow, but they made it up the hill fine. By that time, the sun had set, the snow had turned blue, and shadows were crowding behind every tree. Sam stopped by the front door, to listen and watch. The woods had that special sort of quietness about them that only comes with snow, disturbed by a raven cawing off to the west somewhere. Torn remainders of the day’s snow clouds ran fast overhead, making the shadows restless. Sam watched them move, trying to get used to the normal motion. Nothing else seemed to be stirring.

“Sammy?” Dean’s voice came from the inside and made him jump a little.

“Yeah. Coming.”

He was about to push open the door when he saw, right by his boot, a small curled body of a squirrel. It was sitting perfectly still, hidden in the shadow, and it was waiting – closer than any wild animal would ever approach a human. Sam froze with his hand on the door, and the squirrel looked up then, and he saw that it had pieces of charcoal for eyes. It bared its tiny teeth at him and was gone the next moment.

He only opened the door just wide enough to squeeze through and closed it fast. 

At breakfast the next morning, Sam wore a coat. Dean wore a thin shirt. Sam spent half the night shivering under the blankets, too scared to turn up the heat, and the morning caught him anxious and restless. A headache felt like it was just around the corner. Dean was pale and blue around the lips, which Bobby said was expected. Every time Sam looked at him, it startled him, that dead-like appearance. Going by the way Dean was avoiding mirrors, it bothered him as well. 

They shared a bag of chocolate-covered coffee beans at breakfast. It was profoundly dissatisfying.

“Well, we’re a pair of pansies,” Dean said. Sam looked up, frowning, and was startled – again – by the sight of his blue-lipped smile. 

“I didn’t sleep so well.”

“Me neither.” Dean pushed his cold bagel around the plate, uninterested. “Sorry, dude, I know you’re cold.”

“It’s fine. I wouldn’t want you to melt, you precious snowflake.”

Dean bounced a coffee bean off his forehead. “Sam, would it bother you if I ate some ice chips?” 

Sam lied that it wouldn’t, knowing that Dean would know his lie anyway, then watched Dean crunch ice cubes for breakfast. The headache was starting at his forehead, dull and oppressive. He watched Dean bite down on his lip briefly, and the pale imprint of his incisors wouldn’t disappear. 

Fresh snow fell overnight, covering the tire tracks and the road with them. Sam stood outside, the door firmly closed behind him, brother safe inside, and rubbed at his eyes which hurt from the brightness and felt hot – like charcoals – like there was sand under his eyelids. A set of tracks circled the cabin, close to the wall, over and over again, as if something walked around all night. The tracks changed: from rodent to bird to human to canine to bird again. Sam stared at them. _Gonna die, motherfucker. We’re gonna outlast you on this one._

There was that pack of cigarettes in the Impala’s glove compartment. Sam got it and held it in his hand for a long time and put it away in his pocket without reaching any decision. On the one hand, he was already outside, where hot smoke couldn’t hurt Dean. On the other hand, he wanted to give something up, something other than coffee, hot food and hot showers, which Dean had to give up as well. Some childish, embarrassing thought crept and crept around the edges of his consciousness, something about a sacrifice to buy something good back, and it was too ridiculous to ever give voice to. Dean sold his soul once for Sam. Sam was now giving up cigarettes. _Goddamn, Winchester, way to pay your debts._

For the lack of better ideas, Sam built a snowman. Whenever he glanced through the window, Dean was watching TV, sullen. Sam finished his snowman, stuck two pebbles in for eyes and stepped back to appreciate the work. He shook out a cigarette and was lighting it before he realized what he was doing and spat it out, mad at himself. From afar, the eye pebbles on his snowman looked like charcoal. Sam winced. He picked up the cigarette and stuck it around where the snowman’s mouth would be.

“Have one for me, dude.”

When he turned around, Dean was watching him through the window, looking surprised and like he was perhaps biting the inside of his cheek to stop the laughter. 

The cabin was a single room, with the kitchen in one corner and a bathroom separated out by a wall that was more symbolic than anything else. They shared the bed, though Sam had all the blankets. Sam was scared out of his mind the first night that his body heat was going to melt Dean, that he was going to melt Dean’s arm, shoulder and hip off in his sleep, and Dean had to grab his hand and hold it like Sam was still a baby. _It doesn’t hurt me,_ he had said. _See, Sam? It doesn’t hurt._ His hand was cold as ice.

Sam woke up every morning craving nicotine and the feeling of hot smoke in his chest, the smell of cigarettes and the warmth that came with it. So he looked over at Dean, passed out cold and drooling on the pillow. His lips were still blue and his skin cold but he wasn’t getting any worse either. The torn, crumpled pack stayed in the pocket of Sam’s coat. The little home-made spell was working.

Somewhere in the middle of the second week, Sam woke up in the night to see a face pressed to the window right over their bed. Ice patterns bloomed on the glass all around the face of an old bum that kissed Dean in the parking lot, only now that face was deadly pale and had charcoals for eyes. Sam reached out to rest a hand on Dean’s back, and the old witch sighed and scratched her long thin nails against the glass.

“I will give you ten more brothers,” she said, and her voice was not a voice but the sound of snow squeaking underfoot. “A hundred more brothers. Come with us, too. We eat the sweetest ice and snow pudding at my home.”

Sam flipped her the bird.

“At my home, we smoke icicles.”

Sam leaned over Dean’s sleeping form and breathed on the glass against the witch’s face, melting the ice swirls. She retreated, hissing. Sam yanked the curtains closed. When he lay back down, Dean was looking at him in the dark. 

“I know, right?” Dean said. “It’s hard to turn down those offers.”

“She almost had me at the hundred brothers. A hundred dudes to fart in the car, tell dumb jokes and piss me off. Gee, I don’t know, man.”

“My jokes are awesome.”

“Tell me one.”

“There once was a hedgehog that learned how to breathe through his butthole. Then one day he sat down in a chair and suffocated.”

It was something dumb out of their childhood that used to crack Sam up when he was seven, and it caught him by surprise now. He pressed a pillow over his face and laughed himself dumb until his stomach hurt and his eyes were tearing. 

Dean patted him on the chest when he was done. “It’s okay if you smoke, Sam. If you’re outside, it’s fine.”

Sam rolled his eyes and wondered how it was that everyone but him knew that he smoked. 

On the night of the new moon, Sam dreamed of the calming sensation of hot smoke filling his lungs and the taste of cigarettes on his tongue. He woke up in the dark, in a bed completely soaked through. He couldn’t breathe in a moment of panic, couldn’t speak, just looked for Dean by touch, sure that there it was, there, he had melted his brother with his dreams of smoke. Then Dean punched him on the shoulder and stole his blankets. Sam sat back on his heels, trying to get his panicked breathing under control.

“Fucking. Relax.” Dean was speaking in single words, teeth chattering. “Cold.” 

Sam turned the lights on. Dean had all the covers wrapped around him, and the water was running down his body in rivulets. Sam looked hard but he didn’t seem to be decreasing in size. Slowly, the color was bleeding back into his lips and face. When Sam looked outside, a half-melted snowman with charcoals for eyes was leaning against the door.

“A hundred brothers,” it said, and its voice was the sound of running water. “Icicles. Let me in. Oh please.”

Sam pulled the curtains closed and returned to the bed. When he pressed down on the mattress, water came up. A puddle was already forming on the floor, but Dean’s color was back to normal and he was trembling less. 

“Hey Sam, I definitely want a burger.”

“We’ll get one in the morning.”

“We can get you cigarettes. You’ve been driving me batshit.”

“Sure,” Sam said and knew that he was lying and that Dean knew it, too. It wasn’t a sacrifice if you took it back, even if there was no deal and no crossroads, even if you only promised to yourself. Somewhere, someone would know.


End file.
